


Along with the People Inside

by Childish_paw



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU!Mikoto, F/F, F/M, I made myself cry whilst writing this, Oops, mentioned minor character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 01:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11544708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Childish_paw/pseuds/Childish_paw
Summary: “...What the Uchiha need, Fugaku,” She says slowly, with one last wracking, muffled sob as Uchiha Mikoto looks up, Mangeykou blazing red and black and cold and dead and angry in her eyes-“Is revolution.”





	Along with the People Inside

**Author's Note:**

> Hey-o, peeps! Wassup? I'm Childish' and i'm an idiot who's posting badly written angst that made me cry. Title comes from 'Build God and then we'll Talk' by Panic! at the Disco. Enjoy! (Or not. Your choice.)

It’s raining, the day of the memorial. Or maybe it’s a funeral. Mikoto isn’t really sure, doesn’t really care at this point.  
She doesn’t really care about a lot things right now. Not since she died, and it’s been a good couple of months since then, because they apparently needed to rebuild first, further themselves before they honor the fallen.  
But nonetheless, it’s raining, the way it didn’t when it should’ve, when her best friend’s body was cooling around her wailing son, and if Mikoto were a bit more poetic, she might say that even the sky itself was crying for the casualties, the gods weeping at the destruction. But Mikoto isn’t a poetic person, she’s just cold and angry and sad and mad and dead all at the same time, and she can’t even stand with her family as she mourns.  
No, Uchiha Mikoto is an ANBU captain, and as such, she attends the service that might be a funeral and might be a memorial in full uniform, in metal armor and black clothes and stretch and breath, a katana sheathed over her back. Fugaku stands in front of the rest of the Uchiha clan, holding Itachi’s hand and awkwardly cradling little Sasuke with one arm. It’s a sight they would’ve laughed at, once apon a time.  
(She doesn’t quite know where little Naruto is, but if the way her kouhai’s been turning up later than usual and smelling faintly of milk is any indication, the Hokage’s entrusted the child to him. To Minato’s student instead of her.)

Mikoto stands at the back though, with the rest of the ANBU. Her team is spread behind her, and their painted masks look like demons in the puddles collecting on the soggy ground.  
It’s a bit depressing, and maddening, and terrifying, and in the very back of her numb, numb soul, Mikoto thinks she might understand what their victims feel like when they realize their fate. 

(They’re all pretending they aren’t crying behind those masks, she knows. She’s doing it too, and she wonders if that’s why her eyes sting, or if her Sharingan’s activated by accident again. She always snorted when it happened, y’know. She always had, because the first time it’d happened they’d just been eating lunch and they’d laughed their butts off, because apparently Mikoto was wary that her salad was going to kill her.) 

But Mikoto shoves all that emotions junk to the back of her mind- and maybe it’s a bit easier than it should be, and maybe it should be terrifying, but it’s not, it’s not- and stares straight ahead, stares through the rain and the heads of all the people in front of her and focuses on her picture. 

They’d used the picture they’d used in the bingo book, the one taken once they’d made jounin together, dragging Fugaku along with them. She looks beautiful like that, serious and freckled in her jounin uniform, the one she’d always complained was too uncomfortable, but she was even more beautiful when she was smiling, or laughing, or spattered with blood and walking back with her ANBU team in a yellow sundress even though she wasn’t one of them, how’d she even get there anyways?

(They’d carved her name into the wooden side of the picture frame. Namikaze Kushina, and something rages in Mikoto's chest at the sight because they got it wrong. Kushina had been too stubborn to loose her grip on the one thing tying her back to her clan, to her lineage, to the weight of the legacy bearing down on her. Minato had been in the process of getting his name changed to fit hers, not the other way around.) 

But Mikoto isn’t allowed to be Mikoto now, she has to be Hawk, so she just swallows back her grief and stares at Kushina’s picture and cries her pretty, deadly eyes out. 

+

When Fugaku finds her, it’s that evening, and Itachi is tucked in his bed with the covers pulled up to his chin, and Sasuke is in his cradle, the mobile Kushina made for her when she found out she was pregnant, the one with the seals for protection and good luck and to blow up anyone who tries to harm her baby inked onto wide little rectangular slips of red paper turning gentle circles over his tiny little head.

She sits on the red porch, staring at her reflection in the koi pond. Occasionally, a fish swims across her watery face, and it makes Kushina’s laugh rattle around in her head like the ghost it’s become. Her eyes and puffy and red from crying, dried tears tracks glistening down her cheeks. Her hair is disheveled, because Mikoto hadn’t bothered to pull it out of the ponytail after she slipped out of her wretched ANBU armor, and it hangs half in the hair tie and half out. Her robes are frumpled, hastily pulled on, exposing the majority of one shoulder, and the wooden floorboards creak miserably as Fugaku walks across them to sit with her. 

“...Mikoto,” He says gently,” I know you’re upset.” He speaks to her softly puts a careful hand on her half-bared shoulder, like she’s made of paper and he’s scared of dropping her in the koi pond. It makes her stomach twist, do flip flops and cartwheels and somersaults.  
‘Of course I’m upset,’ She wants to yell at him, ‘Of course I am. Kushina is dead. Kushina is dead!’  
But she doesn’t, just shrugs his hand away and bites her tongue and wonders if the pond is deep enough for her to drown in. Maybe, if she jumps fast and hard enough and lands at the right angle, she’ll hit her head on one of the rocks lining the bottom, and she’ll bleed out and turn the water red and let the pretty fish swim over her and live inside her corpse as she goes to join Kushina in paradise.

(That won’t work, though, because Fugaku will just pull her back out.)

“You heard what the Hokage said,” Her husband, her best friend, the person she wasn’t in love with but married anyways because both the people they loved fell in love with each other, tries again. “It was an accident. I know what she meant to you, but we-” His voice cracks. “-You couldn’t have done anything.” 

Something in Mikoto twists, hot and hard and brittle. 

“Accident? Couldn’t have done anything? Couldn’t have done anything?” Her voices rises in pitch with every word. 

“Fugaku, we could’ve! They kept me away from her while she was giving birth! But we could’ve kept the Kyuubi under control with the Sharingan! With the Mangeykou! But they were more concerned about keeping us under control than keeping the village safe- than keeping her safe…”  
Mikoto’s voice, lowers, softens and splinters like someone picking apart a piece of wood that’s absorbed enough water to make it soft. Her heads drops into her arms, and suddenly she’s crying, wailing, sobbing, sobbing like the world’s ended- and she realizes that it has.

Kushina is dead.  
Uzumaki Kushina is dead.  
Uzumaki Kushina with the red hair and the purple eyes and the freckles across her nose and the pointed grin and the ready fists and the endless appetite for ramen, for almost anything edible, really- 

-that girl is dead, that wonderful girl is deader than a doornail, and so the world can’t be real anymore, it can’t, Mikoto won’t let it be real, and it’s all the damned village’s fault-

“We could’ve,” She echoes, as the heart wrenching, body-shaking sobs suddenly, abruptly stop. 

(Something in Mikoto snaps.)

“...What the Uchiha need, Fugaku,” She says slowly, with one last wracking, muffled sob as Uchiha Mikoto looks up, Mangeykou blazing red and black and cold and dead and angry in her eyes-  
“Is revolution.” 

(For Kushina.)


End file.
